314706 - Opening multiple tabs eats up lot of memory

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[prem]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051006 Firefox/1.4.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051006 Firefox/1.4.1

When opening multiple tabs in firefox, it eventually eats up all the free memory available. I did test and found that when i opened 10-12 tabs in firefox it ate up memory around 98,000 kb, that too big for a browser. I have seen other browsers too. But they dont eat that much memory. I like firefox, its open source. If any one could provide memory management module in firefox it will literally triple the popularity of the browser, espacially among pepople who have less memory with their system.

And opening tabs around 30(not empty tabs) it eats up and hangs the system(with memory 128MB)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

and what do 10-12 running internet explorer processes use opened to the same pages?  I'd be quite curious as to what you think is an acceptable amount of memory to use for holding 12 fully rendered and active web pages, since this complaint is based on arbitrary statements.

This isn't a bug on a specific memory leak, or a case where we use too much memory where we could use less, and thus is basically a generic complaint, not a fixable flaw.  Marking INVALID, based on that.

Comment 2

[Lucius Chiaraviglio]

This should not have been resolved as VERIFIED INVALID.  Just open a large number of tabs (for instance, 33) and look at memory usage in Task Manager.  Windows NT 4.0 Task Manager lists FIREFOX.EXE as using around 35M, but lists system memory usage as ~155M (even though it was between 30M and 40M before starting Firefox 1.5).  The memory is not returned even if you close all but 1 tab.  It is not returned at all until FIREFOX.EXE terminates, which may take many minutes after closing the last Firefox window.

In contrast, Internet Explorer 5.5SP2 will use up large amounts of memory while the multiple windows are open, but will return most of the memory upon closing most of the windows without needing to close all of them.